So this is where my grandmother learned all this! It seems that years later, she still remembered how to make them.
I spent a lot of time sitting next to her doodling while she did chores around the house. I was always amazed at how she started with triangles, squares and circles and then came up with amazing animals.
They are so identical to her drawings (which we no longer have) that they bring tears to my eyes.
And live butterflies that are flying look nice too.
That screed about “dead” butterflies is like insisting Leonardo da Vinci had never seen a real live human being because he drew one with its arms outstretched which is clearly not a resting pose for a man.
Imagine a world in which the vast majority of media showed humans always in the da Vinci pose. No matter if they are eating, talking, walking, sleeping, they are always in that arms outstreched pose. That what the screed about dead butterflies is complaining about.
I bought this for my daughter. She and I have both really enjoyed going through it. I think it’s immensely helpful for kids with perfectionist tendencies to start off with these easy-win drawing books.
Same here. I loved Ed Emberly's books as a kid. I'm pretty sure I also had the Big Purple Drawing Book, among others, since I remember how he drew robots which I thought was really cool
Curious what advice I can get from HN on this. I've loved drawing since I was a little kid, but gave up in middle school because I just didn't know how to get better and didn't have access to improving (no money, nobody I could ask, etc). As an adult, how can I learn to draw? Ideally in a self-guided way
"Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Edwards is a good introduction to drawing. I think in particular it is a good explanation of how much of drawing is learning to look at the world, and exercises to improve your skills of looking at things. One of the big takeaways from this book and other drawing courses I have taken is that once you learn to draw what you see, nothing is particularly easier or harder to draw; in every case you are drawing what you see. The feeling of difficulty in drawing a particular object often comes from trying to parse it into visual symbols, then draw those symbols, rather than seeing the object as a pattern of light and reproducing that on the paper.
This does sort of beg the question though: how do you draw things that don't exist?
Everything (or, almost everything) I personally care about drawing is sci-fi or fantasy, and sort of the whole point of it is that it doesn't actually exist, and therefore I can "see" in a physical sense only my own drawings or those by other artists.
I generally make abstract or surrealist pieces. I don't know where ideas come from, but I do a certain amount of "making things up as I go along"
Realistically, though, sci-fi and fantasy objects are based on objects we have in everyday life. If you look at sci-fi through the years, they have the era's aesthetic: The lines of 50's sci-fi are different from the 80's appeal, for example. And this is where you start to draw the imaginary stuff.
Sci-fi ships? Based off of a combination of naval ships and planes. Get reference photos and use these to guide you, adding and taking away as you see fit. Plant life on another planet? Use plants and fungus from earth as your guide. Again, get reference photos and use these to guide you, changing what you like. Want an easy way to start something more surrealist? Find 3 unrelated reference photos and combine them into one image - use a digital art program to combine them if you'd like.
Note the heavy use of reference photos: I use them whenever I want something shaped in a specific way. If I want a goldfish in a space portal, well, I look up a picture of a goldfish. If I'd like koi instead, I look it up.
I also recommend the Betty Edwards book. It took me from stickmen to realistic drawings of chairs and hands :-)
It also makes you appreciate paintings.
Curiously the book from the TFA is doing almost the exact opposite of what DotRSotB recommends. The former is about parsing things into shapes while the latter is like tracing from an imaginary glass in front of you.
That book temporarily broke my brain. I had trouble turning off that mode of seeing. Possible that my undiagnosed-at-the-time ADHD was finding the shapes of people more interesting than what they were saying. 10/10 would recommend ;)
I've seen this recommended, then criticized, back and forth for ages. But your description makes it sound practical as a beginner, so I think I'll just finally check it out. thanks!
Plenty of good suggestions so I'll just add: draw every day. Guided resources are good but nothing beats just doing it a lot. Start with some simple still life. Get a big pad of paper, an easel if you like, and some charcoal. Each time you do a drawing, to begin with, just focus on one aspect of it. Try to just work on getting the perspective right, keeping in mind a vanishing point. Next just focus on light and shadow. Practice drawing circles. Lots of them. Over and over. Draw 100 vertical lines on a sheet as straight as you can. Drawing uses specific muscles and requires muscle memory to take the line you want to draw in your mind and translate it onto the page. The only way to build that is by just doing it a lot. Next take your still life objects and draw it from the perspective opposite where you're sitting, accounting for the light and perspective. Add in some more difficult things like fabrics or objects with fine texture. Your drawings will suck at first. They always do. Save some as you go as a sampling of your progress. From time to time compare your latest ones to your first ones. What's improved? What hasn't improved? Go outside on some lovely day and find a nice comfortable place to sit and just draw whatever you see. Doodle when you're on the phone. Draw in the margins of everything. Just keep drawing.
I see the value of drawing every day, and I did that as a kid, but the two main issues I faced were (1) I had no idea how to expand my technical skills and (2) I had no idea how to draw more 'realistically' (quotes because my real goal is to draw fantasy/sci-fi subjects).
For example, I actually have charcoal in my art supplies, but I have no idea what to do with it. In my hands it's basically the equivalent of a massive pencil. On top of that, even using it as a large pencil, whatever I draw just looks like a doodle rather than something with any kind of artistic quality
Yes, at a certain point you do need some expert guidance. But nonetheless, experiment.
> In my hands it's basically the equivalent of a massive pencil.
What else can you do with it? What if you turn it sideways? What if you rub your finger where you've already drawn with it? What happens if you crush a small piece of it? What can you do with that? Grab a dry paper towel and start smearing your drawing. Get curious, get crazy.
Drawing realistically begins with understanding light and shadow and form. A good teacher will absolutely speed up that understanding, and if you can find a teacher or class I also highly recommend that, but it can also be achieved through careful observation and experimentation.
> What else can you do with it? What if you turn it sideways? What if you rub your finger where you've already drawn with it? What happens if you crush a small piece of it? What can you do with that? Grab a dry paper towel and start smearing your drawing. Get curious, get crazy.
This is actually part of what has drawn me back to art after not doing it much since I was in school. After getting into my career and adult life, I've gotten so accustomed to following rules and best practices (HIPAA, coding styles, bills, etc etc) I eventually realized, with some shock, that I basically never did anything in life anymore that was purely random and experimental like the stuff you described. I want to balance that out with just having fun creating and being accountable to no one but myself like I did when I was younger. Discussing this further bolsters my resolve to get into this
If I were going to teach myself to draw today, I'd turn to youtube. There are a variety of tutorials: I usually suggest Alphonso Dunn upfront. He also sells books if that is your preference. The youtube content is free, however, and covers a variety of topics.
Books are great, though its been a while since I've bought one: I think my last was portraits and the human body - these were great reference books and honestly, I still miss them sometimes. If I drew more portraits or city scenes, I'd probably get another set.
And realistically, once you get going for a bit, the main thing is practice. Seriously: The main difference between the experienced artist and the beginner is practice. If you can do 10 minutes most days, you'll start seeing a lot of improvement. Some of these practice pieces should be quick (and sloppy), some take more time.
I'd try a variety of subjects because it'll help you later on, but I'd suggest mostly doing pictures that you personally enjoy.
I would definitely suggest starting with more "traditional" art, mostly realism. While I personally do a lot of abstract or surrealist pieces now, I'm really happy my art instruction as a child (through high school) focused more on tradition because it makes me so much more flexible now. (I'm over 40, by the way). This said, if you really enjoy abstract work, start doing some once you feel you are getting some decent control over the pencil, pen, or brush.
And don't be afraid to go into more permanent media or to more sloppy media: You might find charcoal or pastels to be nice and expressive in ways that graphite won't. Similarity, you might have an affinity for ink. And don't forget trying out dip pens! The only way to get over that hump - and many others - is to just try things.
Thanks a lot for such an in-depth response. Read over your suggestions/points and will keep your advice in mind. After the responses I've gotten to my question I feel encouraged to give drawing/art a second chance and your help is much appreciated
Drawabox seems pretty popular on Reddit. It's pretty strict in the "this is the only correct way to learn" sense. If you're into that, it may be an option. It's self-guided, but you can post to get "graded" along the way so you know where to improve.
I'd love to tell you that I went through all this in 2020 during lockdown and now I'm an amazing artist after having a story very similar to yours. However, after buying a full box (12... 20... I don't know) of the fineliners, the first one stopped working almost immediately. The second one was DOA. I pretty much quit out of frustration after that. I recently just bought a 2 pack of a differnt brand (Sharpie), thinking something from a local store may have better luck than whatever Amazon decides to send me. So I'm going to give it another go.
I have seen enough drawing progression posts to accept that drawing is a learned skill and not something you're just born with. I also think patience is a big part of it. When I was in high school, the best thing in my sketch book for art class took me several hours. I was meticulous. Usually I just want to go from nothing to something good in 5 minutes. I've seen posts from people who made amazing stuff who say they spend 50 hours on a drawing. So I guess you get out of it what you put into it.
I have aphantasia and I found the drawabox approach especially appealing and quite similar to how I go about learning a new language, a musical instrument, grasping new math concepts etc.
So, in a sense I wasn't at all surprised to find out that the creator of drawabox Uncomfortable (Irshad) has aphantasia, too.[0]
For people who (have to) rely on a lot abstract thinking, I would highly recommend drawabox.
I got pretty good at drawing, then watercolor, and now oil portraits by starting with the lessons on figure drawing by Stan Prokopenko on YouTube. He's a former instructor at Watt's Atelier (and is an excellent painter), but he is very down to earth and funny. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtG4P3lq8RHGuMuprDarMz_Y9...
He's got affordable courses you can buy as well. The figure drawing course is excellent and a great place to start. He does a great job of teaching foundations so you'll be able to branch from just drawing into draftsmanship, painting, or digital art if you want.
The recommendation to go to weekly figure drawing is excellent. I've been doing that now for years and it's changed the game for me. Highly recommend doing the same if you can. It really helps the mind to see things in 3D then draw them, vs drawing from reference photos (which I do too, but it's not the same).
Interesting; so aside from the cost of supplies, do you think it's reasonable to achieve some level of skill just by self-studying with those videos? By skill here I mean drawing/painting something that suggests some level of artistic skill, rather than the usual results from somebody (like myself) who obviously has no artistic experience lol
I think so. I spent maybe 30-90 minutes a day on art for a year or two and got pretty satisfied with my results. Here's a few pieces I did I was pleased with (some NSFW):
The ticket for me was just to grind it every day. I made art just all the time. I'd copy paintings, do figure drawing, practice from still life, make comics, just anything and everything to get better. If I hated a drawing I'd just photograph and it move on, vs get hung up on disliking it.
do you think it's reasonable to achieve some level of skill just by self-studying with those videos?
Not the person you replied to: But yes. Definitely yes. I've seen adults, in the course of a couple years, go from a complete beginner to selling works that are interesting and fairly original in style. It took work and practice, of course, and most folks are fairly happy well before that. (this was in facebook groups).
Look at it this way: If you set off to do woodworking and followed tutorials, do you think you would develop woodworking skills enough to work with them? The answer is probably yes. Art is the same way.
Very helpful and encouraging point, thanks for sharing that. My interest is just improving, even if it's little by little, so I'm not too daunted by the process taking a long time if I go at it slowly. Definitely gonna give it a try
If you had trouble finding a fun topic for drawing, try something you've never tried. Some ideas: Fantasy maps, landscape concepts, items from your table, building plans, character faces, character bodys, ..
Another idea: Check out open source games (github, etc.) who are looking for artists.
I actually have tons of things I'd love to draw, including some of the things you mentioned. Hence my frustration as a kid at not being able to get better and draw all those things :)
"How to See, How to Draw" by Claudia Nice is a good book for learning to draw in a self-guided way. Doesn't take much money -- $20 at any art supply store can get you a decent drawing book and a decent set of pencils.
I'd take an art class. There's nothing like having a talented teacher (if you can find one) and lots of people around you interested in and working with you towards the same goal.
It's hard for most people to stay motivated without that.. and getting good at art just isn't something you can achieve over the weekend. It's for long distance runners, not sprinters.
Apart from that, draw every day. Quantity beats quality, and ultimately results in quality. Overcoming self-criticism and excuses not to just create more art is half of what being an artist is all about.
I've always found finding things like this difficult. Red Ed classes are generally geared for young kids, to expose them to some new hobby, or for old retired people looking for something to do. I've tried a couple and felt very out of place.
There are community colleges, but that seems like a more involved sign up than I'd like (although I did it once in my mid-20s after graducating from university).
Other than that, I struggle to find in-person places to learn things. Art, cooking, gymnastics, etc. There seems to be a big gap in the market for adults looking to learn things without doing it all on their own. Is there something else out there I'm not aware of?
Search around for an atelier. They are geared towards learning to draw realistically, using classical techniques. Searching for "atelier training", "atelier drawing" on youtube will show you some results of the kind of thing you can expect. Some are online, some are in person. In person, in my opinion, is best.
I just checked out a video and a lady said she spent 40 hours drawing a small sphere. That might be slightly more intense than what I'm after, but probably what I need with my impossible standards.
I do see there is a school just about a mile from me. They have various summer workshops, but many require I take a week off work; they have a couple weekend options too. It looks like they occasionally have some night classes, but they are full. A 10 month long class that doesn't start for 4 months and costs over $2,400 is full... that kind of blows my mind. It seems like doing one of these fundamentals classes would be the way to go before showing up for a 24 hour over 4 day deep dive, live drawing, workshop.
I guess I'll bookmark it and come back to it occasionally to see if something works out for my schedule and current skill level.
"A 10 month long class that doesn't start for 4 months and costs over $2,400 is full... that kind of blows my mind."
Yeah, they've kind of become trendy in recent years.
If you are motivated, while you wait for a class to open up you can definitely use some of the stuff they teach you on your own, like drawing from Bargue plates and casts. Draw from life as much as you can, too. Every little bit of drawing helps. You just have to keep at it.
There are also online artist communities where you can get feedback on your art. Again, a talented teacher is best, but peer critique can be helpful too... and being part of an online community works for a lot of people who can't find/attend an in-person class. So I'd see if I could find some of those. I don't have specific recommendations, unfortunately, but I know they're out there. Searching on youtube or social media sites might yield some results.
I've had luck in finding life drawing groups (where you draw from a live model) through meetup.com. They were pretty cheap. They offered no instruction, but at least you were drawing from life and were among other artists.
It's crazy how little has changed in drawing styles since the 30's. Those books look like something you could buy today (or at least find on the internet, I'm not sure if people still buy drawing books)
The fundamentals are always the same. Start with a rough shape that vaguely resembles the thing you’re drawing. Work over it to make it look more like the thing. Look at real examples of the thing if you want to. When you reach the desired level of detail, call it done.
The details change over time. New conceptual tools, new mark-making tools. But the process I use as an artist is fundamentally unchanged since the first caveman saw firelight flickering on a bulge in a cave, said “hey, that looks like a bull”, then picked up a bit of charcoal to make some marks that make it look even more like a bull.
> The fundamentals are always the same. Start with a rough shape that vaguely resembles
> the thing you’re drawing. Work over it to make it look more like the thing.
Also called "remove everything that isn't elephant".
I'd say a whole lot has changed in drawing styles. There just happened to be a fairly accessible style of drawing that these sort of books teach which has stuck around well. It can be a nice intro to art and at least starts you thinking about how to construct your drawings. But yeah, once you move past that it's fairly impressive how much things have changed/evolved in drawing.
What is the progression that should be followed? I first I thought it was step by step instructions, but some progressions have deleted lines, or lines with modified shape. (Sorry for my ignorance in this subject)
- Like the others said, light pencil is a good way to do it, then erase after the final ink/paint/whatever dries. This is what I usually do for my watercolors. I'll take about a 60% of the pencil sketch off with a polymer eraser before putting down paint, and clean off the rest when it dries.
- Another trick is to use a light blue colored pencil (there are specific non-photo blue pencils for this) for all the structural lines. When you scan or photograph the drawing, use processing software to dump the blue channel when you convert to black and white.
- Use a lightbox to trace the finished drawing. This is a nice way to work because you can keep the original draft and experiment with it and iterate on it.
- If you're drawing digitally, use a different layer for each step. Similar to the above.
- Use carbon paper to transfer the drawing, only going over the lines you want to keep. Just make sure it isn't waxed. I used to use my college newspaper for this.
Generally: use a pencil, not a pen, erase parts you don’t want any more. Or work digitally and lower opacity of early roughs to work over in greater detail. These are all examples of blocking in a simple shape and refining it towards an ever-more detailed drawing.
They are rendered in ink lines because that is far easier to reproduce.
I think of it more like a learning guide. Initially you include the guide lines and just sketch over them to refine the shape. Once you've become familiar with the shape you can just draw close to the final version with no guide lines, and just mentally visualise the positions of the guidelines if you need to.
How do you do that without smudging the ink? On the rare occasion I doodle with some effort, I've found it impossible to erase the pencil lines without just making things even messier in the process lol
Draw with a light touch on the pencil. Addressing the paper with the side of the pencil point instead of the tip helps a lot - this stops you from making a trench in the paper with graphite at its bottom, and forces you to use a broad line without much detail for blocking things in. (This also helps to train you to draw with your wrist static, which is a good way to keep repetitive stress injuries from happening. It was one of the first things the old pros taught me when I started working in animation, because they had all seen careers cut short by injuries from bad form.)
As you add detail, shift to the tip of the pencil. Your hand will probably smudge the first lines into nothingness as you do this, it’s not a big worry. Grab a white plastic eraser or a kneaded eraser, and go at it.
If you decide to go from pencil to ink, you can put some thought into your choice of ink to select one that dries quickly. You can also wait a bit for the ink to dry before erasing. White paint/ink does exist but it’s real hard to find some that works well in a portable pen format.
The second-to-last butterfly is the complete, instantly-recognizable shape of the butterfly; the rest is just coloring and shading. Getting the shape right is probably harder! The butterfly also probably makes a point about the importance of getting the basic shape right before you get tangled up in the fine details --- you can be "wrong" about the butterfly pattern and still produce a butterfly, but it's much less ok to be wrong about the shape?
The goal isn't really to make that exact butterfly. Once you have the basic wireframe, make your own butterfly with your own style in the details, or with color and shape of a specific species.
Thanks for the link! I'm glad to have more comments to read about this. That thread has one of my all-time favorite moderator comments on it.
On HN, stories are "duplicates" iff (a) they've been posted within the last year ("or so") and (b) they've had significant discussion already on those threads. This post flunks (b) but not (a) and is thus cromulent.
Ahh, I think that's what the humorous tag is for. Google should probably make that bit a tad more prominent, or I should learn to read farther down the page.
Cromwell, crumpets, parliament... It's definitely a well made non-word.
Oh here we go again. Waiting for all the "this is a wrong way to draw" critiques. Keep in mind that this is a children's book about drawing animals using lines, not an anatomical study for an academic artist.
It'd be more relevant if the owl or Tick memes actually showed you a process to derive a picture of an owl, or The Tick, like this book does with many of the animals it illustrates. But you just knew someone was going to have to drop this meme on this thread.
I dunno. In most of those, the "small details" are actually small - but some, e.g. the butterfly, the boar or well, the owl, get pretty close to r/restofthefuckingowl territory.
Makes sense, pedogogically: if you're really trying to teach anything, it's the idea of abstracting things and building them up from shapes. You'd start by giving step-by-steps for simple animal drawings, and progress to examples that give less hand-holding.
I guess if I have an objection to the owl meme, it's that most of these examples pretty much just work; they're not at all "rest of the owl" throw-aways.
Agreed, which is why I meant some of them. Most of them look reasonably easy to follow, including the last step.
I think in general, the owl meme has its purpose though: I'd see it as a reminder to be aware of "expert blindness": If you have lots of practice in a subject, part of your skills or knowledge will become subconscious and you're at risk forgetting they are acquired skills/knowledge at all. If you try to write an "introduction for beginners" piece without being self-aware about this, things can get frustrating for the people you're trying to teach.
I guess the meme is the art equivalent of "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"... :)
Right, I have no objection to the owl meme by itself, just to the idea that these instructions are a good example of it. But people see instructions on drawing an owl and immediately post a meme that effectively says "instructions on how to draw an owl are impossible". Fooey.
The owl meme is an exaggeration of the truth which typically looks like these examples. The frustration too is an exaggeration. I think the meme is very relevant, although, I'll grant you, a bit trite.
The zebra is very Rest Of The Fucking Zeba. But then again the zebra is also near the end of the book, and essentially a stripey horse. You can sort of infer “well I already showed you how to draw a horse, right? Draw a horse and out stripes on it”.
Really the instructional step missing in the last images of a lot of this is “go look at the actual thing and take details from there”.
Exactly. The unwritten guidance in the last step for these is "look, you don't really want to just draw this exact zebra every single time, fill in the details of the zebra you want to draw in the style that you want to draw it".
It's kind of a problem with the step-by-step style of instruction in general. A lot of students take away that this is exactly the one and only way how to draw the thing, and you have no talent unless you can do it just like this. Draw the rest of this owl and that is how you draw an owl.
When I was teaching my daughter, I did a lesson where I ran it the other way around. We started by just drawing basic shapes and cutting them out of card stock. Then I posed the challenge of "How can we make the parts of a cat from these? How can we make the cat from those parts?" as a way to build a visual language and individual style first. Were they photo-realistic cats? No, but they were fine, unique, expressive things.
The last question was "what if we only had squares? could we still make a cat? why would someone ask us to design such a cat?" and she immediately said "oh, if we were making it for Minecraft!"
We still practice contour drawing and other more classical exercises, but I try to leave as much room as I can for experimentation, self-style, iteration, and discovery. Step-by-step approaches tend to forget to mention that.
Yeah, this is an easy nuance to miss in solely image-based step-by-step books. Kid me never figured it out! Adult me obviously picked it up somewhere along the way. :)
Leaving room for style is a complicated thing, if you say “it’s my style!” too often in defense to people trying to critique your work (especially artists who have been at it longer than you) then maybe what you actually have is a big gap in what you are able to draw that you are trying to cover with “style”. There’s a a point in every young artist’s development where they get obsessed with “finding their style” and it’s usually at a time where they still have a ton of gaps in their anatomy, rendering, and general knowledge that they’re covering up with “style” borrowed from someone else without really understands what’s going on with it and why. But actively spending a lot of time playing with different ways to stylize reality is part of how you find the set of stylisations that work well for you, so you’re probably putting your daughter on a good path here!
They imply that there is a "trick" to drawing each animal — if you can just remember the initial shape, small strokes made for each animal. Drawing by memorization.
On the other hand they sort of show you that the final image is built up, not drawn as a single, free-hand, outline.
To be sure though it was a book like this that got me started drawing as a kid.
Before you upvote this post, note that ddtaylor is basically farming karma by reposting past HN stories that got significant upvotes. You can see from the user's posting history that roughly 2 posts per hour are occurring, one of which is usually an old article, and this pattern has continued over the past several days. It would probably be a good idea for someone to report this to @dang.
This kind of implies some kind of automated posting as well, since it's unlikely somebody is sitting in front of their computer 24 hours a day to post twice an hour.
What is the point of doing something like this here? Supposedly on a site like reddit people do this to increase karma and then can sell their account or whatever, but I don't see much of a point in doing that here.
I spent a lot of time sitting next to her doodling while she did chores around the house. I was always amazed at how she started with triangles, squares and circles and then came up with amazing animals.
They are so identical to her drawings (which we no longer have) that they bring tears to my eyes.